Land / Food

Palestinians, Native Americans, and the Irish share deep reverence for the land. To justify the theft ofthose lands, occupiers not only postulate the racial, religious, and cultural inferiority of those they are subjugating, they also reach back to the Roman law of res nilius, “unoccupied or underutilized land,” considered wasted until someone – the colonizer – placed it under “proper use.” Thus Roman and future colonizers could convince themselves that no human beings inhabited the coveted territory.

The English invasion of Ireland was a dress rehearsal for their incursions into North America. In Ireland, colonizers decimated forests, plowed over hunting grounds, and confiscated modest, sustainable homesteads, transforming them into huge plantations. In the Americas, some indigenous people were restricted to reservations, where those who had once been nomadic hunter/gatherers were now forced to farm. Others, like the settled Mayan people of Guatemala, were left with only steep mountainsides to terrace for meager cultivation. Illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land double annually, and with the settlers comes deliberate destruction of ancient olive trees – 7,500 in 2011 alone -- essential to Palestinians for livelihood and nourishment.

Food is a weapon of suppression. Its lack brings starvation and disease.

In Ireland, An Gorta Mór, The Great Hunger (1845 to 1851), was caused when the potato crops -- on which the people relied almost entirely – were infected with fungus and rotted. Roughly one million Irish died. British rulers made few if any adequate efforts to aid the starving, instead evicting thousands from their homes.

In 1847, the Choctaw Nation collected $750 (approximately $18,000 today) and donated it to Irish Famine Relief. The empathetic Choctaw understood eviction, starvation, cold, and disease having been forcibly sent in 1831 from their ancestral lands in Mississippi to what is now Oklahoma. In 1992, the Irish repaid the Choctaw with great ceremony and a plaque in Dublin that reads:

Their humanity calls us to remember the millions of human beings ...who die of hunger and hunger-related illness in a world of plenty.

The land-and-sea blockade and frequent bombing of Palestine’s Gaza Strip have created economic devastation, with supplies of food, medicine, and other commodities dwindling. The Irish Ships to Gaza, part of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign and the international Freedom Flotilla Movement (including, among many others, North Americans, Turks and Israelis), was established in 2010 to send large Irish contingents -- representing all elements of civil society -- to help break the siege and deliver urgently needed humanitarian aid.